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Comment DRM's coffee is even better! (Score 1) 108

I'm sure that DRM-controlled coffee pods: https://www.coffeesexploration... reduce the risk even more.
They will even reduce the risk of hair loss and impotence, not to talk about the risk of personal bankruptcy.
And if I buy a subscription to DRMd coffee pods will even prevent my car from breaking down (even though I don't have a car)

Comment Google is forcing Gemini on Android (Score 3, Interesting) 28

A few days ago I got a message from Google informing me that they are forcing Gemini on Android devices.
As expected, I was informed that Gemini will slurp up everything I do on the Android tablet to "better something, something".
I don't think I'm the only one who thinks that the value of the AI chatbots is in the information that people reveal about themselves.
When spying on websites, users can only click on what is presented to them. On the other hand, keeping users engaged in a "conversation" will make them reveal information that the designers of the website did not think of.
Google being in the personal data business have the greatest need to slurp up as many conversations with the chatbots as possible, so they will try to grab marketshare from OpenAI.

Comment Mosquitoes are attracted by the CO2 (Score 3, Insightful) 36

It is known that mosquitoes locate humans by tracking the carbon dioxide that humans release:

https://www.sciencenewstoday.o...

Beer bubbles are nothing but carbon dioxide bubbles, so carrying around an open can/bottle of beer is nothing more than carrying around a homing beacon for mosquitoes.

Comment Hollywood is out of ideas (Score 1) 32

The big studios are out of ideas when it comes to movies as the requirement is blockbusters only.
Smaller movies which do not deal with saving the world are not allowed.
There is a reason a series like "Trailer Park Boys" was not made in Hollywood.
Therefore, the bean counters that run the studios are now mandating that only movies that have shown commercial success in the past are allowed to be produced in the form of re-makes.
Re-imaging old movies instead of actually re-making them reduces costs and promises higher return-to-investment ratios.
The "Chinese Studios" doing the re-imaging is certainly not for their internal market, it must be at Hollywood's bidding. All the movies they plan to re-image have had commercial success in the West and it is definitely cheaper to outsource the re-imaging to the Chinese studios.

As for the post here on /.:
" which turned Li into a bone fide movie star"
if is actually "bona fide": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...

  which turned Li into a bone fide movie star

Comment Looke like a desperate push ... (Score 4, Interesting) 157

... for profitability. I believe the investors are already asking for returns and they are not materializing with generative AI sliding into the "trough of disillusionment": https://www.economist.com/busi...
Also, Nadella of Microsoft not being in speaking terms with the CEO of OpenAI is not very encouraging. Microsoft is not seeing a return on the 10s of billions dumped into Energophag Eliza and the shareholders are asking questions.
To save his own skin Nadella has recently implemented massive layoffs at Microsoft, in order to recoup some of the cash.
It looks like a lot of people have bet massively on AI which is being pushed on the users at every opportunity. The potential users are not asking for it, it is being pushed on them.
If the AI bubble goes like the dot com bubble I believe a lot of politicians will be very grumpy with their personal fortunes greatly reduced.
In the meantime, what happened to the blockchain? It was all the rage only 3 years ago.

Comment How about code maintenance? (Score 1) 19

Everybody hypes the code generation ability of AI, forgetting the ages-old wisdom that code is read a lot more than it is written. Look at any large software project and you'll see that there are a few lucky bastards who got to write the code and an army of maintainers lucky if they get to write "10 lines per day".
The 10 lines per day is generous as the "1000 lines per year" is more accurate and there are about 250 working days in the year.
Right now my team has to diagnose a crash that happens on cloud machines but so far we could not reproduce it locally. Good luck getting AI to help with that one.

Comment Darling of the bean counters (Score 1) 100

I had to use Java in a few places and I got to understand why it is loved so much by hiring managers and bean counters.
The very authors of Java called it "C++ --". They took C++ and cut off the sources of 90% of the bugs encountered in C++ (pointers and operator overloading), added garbage collection, effectively baby-proofing the language.
This lead to non-crashing code being written by really bad programmers that are cheap to hire. The trouble is that the pointy-haired bosses of the programming industry believe that all it takes for code to work is not to crash.
In fact, some of the pointy-haired bosses even decided to try their hand at programming in Java, ended up with non-crashing code, and concluded that "it's easy".
The end result is that large programs (systems?) written in Java have much crappier code than C++ by the time they finally start to crash. But the programmers that are maintaining these projects are much cheaper to hire than the ones for equivalent projects written in C++.

Comment Jail time ? (Score 0) 78

A new law must be passed that stipulates jail time for anyone who reads the paper on self-replicating AI.
Why should it be only for this ? https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

The only good outcome is that all these rapid-fire news will have the effect of pulling the investor's attention in may directions so they won't be all focused on dumping money on OpenAI's Energophag Eliza.

By the way, that thing is valued at close to 100B$.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02...

Comment So Intel is turning into AMD ? (Score 2) 30

Looks like Intel tried to use the political connections of their CEO to force Apple and Nvidia to use their foundries:

https://www.tomshardware.com/t...

Another thing was to get subsidies from the government under the CHIPS act:

https://www.tomshardware.com/t...

Now that these have no chance of materializing, and their attempt to corner the market for EUV litography machines proved too expensive, the CEO was kicked out and they have to follow in the steps of AMD.

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